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Notes from outside the hall
A week's worth of observations
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2004, NEW YORK -- Protest sign verbiage, the "don't" example. In Sunday's massive United for Peace and Justice march, your sign was competing against many others passing the viewer at the same time. Writing "ACCOUNTABLE" down the left side as an acronym and filling in phrases beginning with each of those 11 letters ("Abu Ghraib," etc.) does not work.

The "do" example, a couple of yards behind. "Bush can kiss my black ass."

Protest Girlie-Men, you mean. A group of 30 or so counter-demonstrators calling themselves the Protest Warriors (www.protestwarrior.com), held aloft impressive white cardboard signs with snarky anti-liberal humor at Broadway and 34th Street during the UFPJ march. When the cops began to quickly close off the street (due to the float-afire incident a block away), they ran like a herd of antelopes on Wild Kingdom that just spotted a leopard, shoving people aside as they sprinted down Columbus to avoid trouble.

Best organized -- repeat winner. You cannot swing a stick anywhere in midtown this week without hitting a Falun Dafar protester.

Just a thought. If you were on the other side of Broadway Wednesday morning during the "Pink Slip Line" demonstration that ran all the way from Wall Street to Times Square, could you have resisted grabbing a friend's hand and chanting "Red Rover, Red Rover, send…"?

Waiting for game action. On a street corner across from the main protesting staging area at 8th Avenue and 30th, metal barricades fashion a small triangular sliver of a camera pit, similar to the one you typically see near the dugout at a major league baseball game. Lights and camera equipment fill it, but most of the time there is no action. Occasionally a well-dressed person stands up and one of the lights bursts on, and he or she speaks into empty space. If the reporter is really lucky, there is a poorly-dressed person there to talk to the empty space also, telling viewers somewhere about protesting, and stuff.

A sad, sad mouse. On my way to Times Square Monday to investigate rumors that a group of protesters called the Mouse Bloc was being arrested, I ran into Becky Johnson of New Hampshire. She was dressed as a mouse, with a handmade gray skullcap, ears, tail, and cartoon bubble "Boo!" coming from her head (to scare the GOP elephants). She was leaving the area, heading uptown. Johnson had seen the call to action on counterculture.org. "I thought it was a very creative way of protesting," she said. Unfortunately, she said, she never did find the other mice. I later found out that Mouse Bloc demonstrators don't actually dress as mice.


Issue Date: September 2, 2004
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